Due to an increasing demand for greater throughput in multimedia communications, there is a desire to make use of potentially available wide bandwidth channels having an allocated resource (e.g., frequency coverage) that overlaps the coverage of two or more legacy communications channels. Since any one of the overlapped legacy channels may be in use at various times, the question arises: how to determine when the overlapping channel is available for communication? Waiting for all overlapped legacy channels to release resources (e.g., to become idle) at the same time may result in undesirable delay periods.